\section{David Wood}
\label{sec:davidwood}

%As mentioned in {subsec:presentation}, David 

\subsection*{Ecosystem Leadership}

Already in his introduction of himself, David Wood indicates an unbalance in power inside the Symbian ecosystem:

\begin{quote}
\textit{``And then in 2009 it was clear that Symbian foundation, which was the open source foundation created when Nokia took over the remaining shares from the other shareholders, separate groups formed called the Symbian Foundation. I worked in that for a while but became clear that it wasn't going to succeed and I left it at that stage.''} (Track 1: 01.00)
\end{quote}

\noindent David Wood apparently, directly or indirectly, left Symbian because of a change in the power equilibrium in Symbian. His realization of Symbian Foundation's inability to succeed and his consequent resignation is a concise and highly relevant perspective to include in this analysis as it shows what can be interpreted to be the ultimate consequence of disagreement and inopportune strategies and market forces. One can relate it to Moore's definition of an ecosystem's last stage of death or renewal, in this case death, where there was an increasing threat from new ecosystems and challenges in providing a continuous product. \bigskip

\noindent Already in the beginning of the interview David Wood gives an implicit explanation of how Symbian was put together. He describes how Psion wanted to create a partnership in order to achieve scale for an operating system called EPOC 32:

\begin{quote}

\textit{``... over time we realized actually we needed more investment from different companies to help us achieve the scale that we needed. We already engaged in serious licenseeing discussions, serious development projects with Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola - all three - and the natural choice [...] was that they would become shareholders in the company as well.''} (Track 1: 01.00)

\end{quote}

\noindent This is exactly what is defined as horizontal integration of an ecosystem, where companies producing similar goods create partnerships to conquer a certain market, which goes hand in hand with Schumpeter's mention of temporary monopolies as a necessity to provide incentive for the firms to innovate. This is also emphasized by the fact they \textit{``wouldn't each independently need to grow or source a complex software system for their handsets,''} (Track 1: 06.40) and they could focus on one common network and how to expand their common installed base of users. \bigskip 

\noindent David Wood describes more in depth how the leadership of Symbian  was increasingly taken over by Nokia:

\begin{quote}

\textit{``[The shareholders] had definitely had different visions and some of them outperformed others, and then over time Nokia was more and more confident that they had a lot of added value inside their own resources, things like their series 60 user interface, also software at the lower levels which they owned and controlled. So they wanted to continue on that, whereas the other manufacturers were missing corresponding features, and Symbian was unable to invest to provide corresponding features to other licensees such as Sony-Ericsson and Motorola because our funding was constrained to look after the needs of the single most successful customer which was Nokia.''} (Track 1: 06:40)

\end{quote}

\noindent This is in fact an example of a lock-in within Symbian, where Nokia is keeping Symbian and the other partners locked-in, not necessarily to an inferior standard, but to Nokia's own standards. This is emphasized by the concrete example of a platform fragmentation, which proliferated when Nokia got more influence. Symbian was afraid to give away source code, and David Wood explained what then happened:

\begin{quote}

\textit{``Nokia changed more and more of the lower parts of the software as well as the upper layers, and they obtained control which we were unable to influence over time.''} (Track 1: 08.45)

\end{quote}

\noindent Nokia controlled the interfacing code within Symbian and thereby gained control over its internal compatibility standards. Updegrove has warned about this with his conclusion that focus on self-interest in a consortium is likely to lead to the creation of products that customers ignore. Also it seams like a vicious circle when relating to West and Dedrick's observation that \textit{``[f]irms that control the interfaces [of a platform] - usually through application programming interfaces (APIs) - can control of the supply of complements and thus the allocation of profits that accrue to the platform.''} \citep{WESTDEDRICK} It seems like a positive feedback situation inside Symbian where Nokia grew stronger and stronger but a simultaneous external negative feedback in the smartphone market. He talks further about how this resulted in situations where one application did run seamlessly on one device but failed on another:

\begin{quote}

\textit{``... the reason it failed is because the project team inside the licensee had modified bits of the source code in ways that made sense for them individually, but which damaged the health of the whole ecosystem and health of the whole platform.''} (Track 1: 08.45)

\end{quote}


\subsection*{Conflicting Interests}

It is a reasonable thought that issues in ecosystem leadership inherently result in conflicting interests among the shareholders. We want to point out if some of these conflicts were somehow related to issues in standardization or standardization concepts. \bigskip

\noindent David Wood explains that the shareholders initially \textit{``had the mantra, the motto if you like, that they should cooperate before competing,''} (Track 1: 06.40) but after some time this mantra was compromised. An example of interests directly conflicting is revealed by David Wood:

\begin{quote}

\textit{``There were some believers inside Nokia too, of the principle of open source, but it turned that Nokia is a whole worse less interested of that in practice, whereas the other shareholders were the ones that pushed hardest for the creation of this.''} (Track: 11.40)

\end{quote}

\noindent David Wood \textit{``was pushing inside Symbian for a wider sharing of the source code''} (Track 1: 08.45) himself, but stronger forces made that impossible. This goes directly against Joel West's idea of maximizing adoption throughout the value chain with an open strategy. One can relate to what Varian and Shapiro wrote about open versus closed strategies. They say that you have to be able to ignite positive feedback on your own if you choose a closed strategy. Then you can take control of intellectual property of cause if you have the required technical capabilities. \bigskip

\noindent When talking about conflicting interests, it seems relevant to mention how public policy has interfered with the interests of Symbian. David Wood explains how the high prices of 3G licences went against the interests of the telecommunication industry in general:

\begin{quote}

\textit{``There was also a lot of money, which was used up in many European countries purchasing 3G licenses - they were auctioned of by governments at very expensive rates, and many people in the industry didn't have much discretion or any funding left. So for all these reasons it took a while for the first smart-phones to come out.''} (Track 1: 03:20)

\end{quote}

\noindent But according to King, \textit{``taking account of standards and regulations is part of the routine that successful firms follow,''} \citep{KING} and so 3G was inevitable.

\subsection*{Innovation Retardation}

A determination of the type of innovation in Symbain might be relevant for us when discussing what went wrong. Using Schilling's four dimensions of innovation, Symbian can be classified as mix between radical and incremental innovation. On one hand the term of smart-phones was radically new:

\begin{quote}

\textit{``Symbian was created before the ideas of smart-phones were commonplace. In our initial discussions way back in 1996, there was discussion about smart-phones, but if you do a search on the Internet there is actually very little public discussion about smart-phones that far back.''} (Track 1: 03.20)

\end{quote}

\noindent But it was also incremental due to its extension and further development of Psion's EPOC 32 operating system. \bigskip

\noindent A lot can be analysed regarding the hindrance of such innovative processes especially if we again relate to the transformation of Symbian from an open system to a system closed around Nokia. We know from Krechmer that patents that favour one party over another in a consortium only provide an incentive to disagree. This will lead to destruction of innovative processes. One reason why this this internal closure happened can possibly be connected with the formation of the consortium. As mentioned in section \ref{sec:focus}, there are certain possibilities of danger in a using a horizontal integration strategy. Ancarani and Shankar explain how symmetric knowledge, a direct consequence of horizontal integration, can lead to a consortium without an ability to create new knowledge. An example of this inability can be seen in this statement by David Wood:

\begin{quote}

\textit{``It had become too slow a process for companies to add extra features - individual features into Symbian. Symbian itself was released in quite a timely way and a regular rhythm, but inside Nokia it took very very long time for the changes we made in Symbian to work their way through, the integration with Series 60, the changes a lower level of the operating system as well. So it took a long time to actually bring innovations to market.''} (Track 1: 15.40)

\end{quote}

\noindent Furthermore he explains that \textit{``there is no point having great ideas if it takes you far too long to implement them, and that was what happened inside Nokia.''} (Track 1: 19.15). In the paper \textit{``Evolving an Open Ecosystem: The Rise and Fall of the Symbian Platform''} written by David Wood and Joel West, they conclude that \textit{``[a]lthough Nokia lacked a controlling interest in Symbian, its de facto control of Symbian's revenues allowed it to discourage (if not block) efforts by Symbian to create competitors to Nokia.''} \citep{WESTWOOD2}

When Nokia starves its own platform to prevent competitors, it inherently slows down the innovation processes of Symbian. Blind's statement, that standards function as competition and innovation enhancers, is interesting. If competition is hindered, then standardization processes are hindered and he sees compatibility standards as the basis for innovation in network industries. \bigskip

\noindent At last the seeming lack of innovation can be explained by their wrong choice of path dependence:

\begin{quote}

\textit{``Touch was something that the Symbian supported in the very beginning and the earliest Symbian devices had support for touch. Ericsson and Sony/Ericsson produced a range I quite uccessfull touch phones running UIQ, which was their variant of series 60. Nokia however, was much more negative and sceptical about the importance of touch, so they didn't prioritize it.''} (Track 1: 13.57)

\end{quote}

\noindent Competition from Android and Apple forced the innovation in another direction possibly resulted in an acceleration of the rate of knowledge depreciation inside Nokia and Symbian, as Foray prescribes \citep{FORAY}.


\subsection*{Other Relevant Topics}

The validity and especially the reliability of David Wood's statements are relatively high partly because of his contribution to several research papers, which makes his statements very reproducible. We assess his validity to be relatively high because of his early and significant engagement in both Psion and Symbian, and the fact that he himself was a main decision maker increases his validity:

\begin{quote}

\textit{``We already engaged in serious licensing discussions, serious development projects with Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola - all three - and the natural choice which came about after a few frantic months of negotiations and discussions was that they would become shareholders in company as well. So that happened en 1998 and I was on the initial executive team there, which responsibility at that time for technical consulting, which was the teams that interfaced to the licensees - that is the phone manufactures.''} (Track 1: 01.00)

\end{quote}

\noindent We can compare what David Wood says about the diffusion of Symbian to Moore's model of technology adoption life cycle. According to David Wood, Symbian definitely crossed the chasm and hit a peak in smartphone sales:

\begin{quote}

\textit{``Then we were exited to find we sold a million devices in one quarter, a million devices in one month, and later on even a million devices in one week.''} (Track 1: 03.20)

\end{quote}

\noindent Symbian did in fact target 'The Point of Attack', by doing all it could to be a dominant leader in the market and the creation of a broad ecosystem and an technology alliance formed an 'Invasion Force'. On the other hand, Moore explains how important customer application dependency is to secure platform adoption and as mentioned, Symbian apparently was not able to lock customers in to any software over time. 


%They fulfilled many of the 5 definitions of innovation by Schumpeter:

%\textit{``But we had the vision, that one day, indeed, almost everybody would be carrying a smart-phone, and that you would need a special software system to enable such a device, that this would embody some of the features of computing, but also the features of communications.''} (Track 1: 03.20)
